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From Afar (2015)

Review #1,269

THE SCOOPDirector: Lorenzo VigasCast: Alfredo Castro, Luis Silva, Jericó MontillaPlot: Armando, a 50 year man, seeks young men in Caracas and pays them just for company. One day he meets Elder, a 17 years boy that is the leader of a criminal gang, and that meeting changes their lives forever.Genre: Drama / CrimeAwards: Won Golden Lion (Venice).Runtime: 93minRating: R21 for homosexual themeInternational Sales: Celluloid DreamsIN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)

Coming right from the Chilean school
of Pablo Larrain, From Afar adds to
the growing chorus of South American arthouse films that emerged with a
characteristic self-assuredness since the late 2000s. As a feature debut, Venezuelan director
Lorenzo Vigas shows confidence in his material to work cinematically.

While it doesn't completely sparkle
on the screen, there is a kind of tightly-controlled filmmaking that provides
the picture with an undercurrent marked by tension and taboo – the craft
immediately reminded me of Larrain's Post Mortem (2010), a film that makes a political statement on the 1973 Chilean
coup.

Shot by Larrain's director of
photography Sergio Armstrong, and starring his acting muse Alfredo Castro, From Afar is possibly one of the few
films to emerge from Venezuela with international credibility – its Golden Lion
win at the Venice Film Festival surprised many, though in all fairness the
prestigious award is an affirmation of the cinema that is evolving in the
region, shining even greater light on emerging filmmakers, and giving
cinephiles reason to explore, in this case, Venezuela’s capital city Caracas.

As the country’s commercial and
cultural center, Caracas forms the backdrop of the movie. We see long queues of people waiting to get
their basic necessities from a shop, or delinquent youths hanging about on the
roadside, part of a larger gang that we don’t bear witness to. Everything seems all right, but under the
façade lies a nation struggling to serve her citizens.

In this climate, Castro plays
Armando, a gay man who is afraid of intimacy, perhaps due to a childhood trauma
as suggested by the film. He pays young
men to come to his apartment, but it is not for sex. Rather, it is to pleasure himself – he would
ask his subject to face away from him and lower his pants slightly, a sight
that proves erotic for Armando, who masturbates… from afar.

One day, he meets a 17-year old boy
who is part of a gang, and their meeting changes both their lives
irreversibly. From a storytelling
perspective, Vigas’ film is stripped bare of any excess, and then some. The drama is elliptical, and the characters’
motivations are often ambiguous. As
audiences, we are forced to make connections, to find reasons for action or
inaction, up till the puzzling, unexpected ending.

From
Afar will reward viewers who are looking
for films that don’t spoon-feed or regurgitate a familiar narrative. Its restrained and sparse filmmaking style, a
marker of Vigas’ assured ability as a director, may prove challenging to some,
but really this is a debut to suggest great things to come from him.